African-American
See also: African American
English
[edit]Alternative forms
[edit]
Etymology
[edit]Patterned on forms such as Irish-American, popularized by Jesse Jackson[1] and in common use since the late 1980s.[2]
Pronunciation
[edit]Noun
[edit]African-American (plural African-Americans)
- A member of an ethnic group consisting of Americans of black African (particularly Niger-Congo) descent.
- Synonyms: Afro-American, Afromerican, (slang, archaic, US) unbleached American; see also Thesaurus:person of color
- (US, loosely, proscribed, sometimes offensive) Any black American person; by extension, any black person.
Usage notes
[edit]- In the US, this term is often seen as a more formal and polite alternative to black.[3]
- Aside from black and of color, most other synonyms are dated, and likely to be considered offensive in the US.
- This term is not generally used for Americans of North African descent, such as Moroccans or Lower Egyptians, nor is it used for European Africans. It is used specifically to denote a population within the United States whose ancestry can be traced to West and Central African peoples brought through the Atlantic slave trade, and whose collective historical experience has been shaped by slavery, racial segregation, and the civil rights movement. However, the term is at times applied imprecisely to other groups, including individuals of West Indian origin, recent African immigrants, or more broadly to any black individual, irrespective of distinct cultural, historical, or national backgrounds. This incorrect usage can cause offense.
Derived terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]A black American
Adjective
[edit]African-American (comparative more African-American, superlative most African-American)
- Of a person, pertaining to the African-American ethnicity.
- Synonym: Afro-American
- 2015 April 28, Ben Brumfield, “Baltimore riots: A few people tried to stop the unrest”, in CNN[1]:
- The rioters overshadowed the message of peaceful protesters on prior days: They had called for justice for Gray, a 25-year-old African-American man who died from spinal injuries after police arrested him this month.
- (US, loosely, proscribed, sometimes offensive, of a person) Black.
- Of or pertaining to the culture of African-American people.
- African-American music
Usage notes
[edit]- See the notes about the noun, above.
Translations
[edit]American and black
|
References
[edit]- ^ Isabel Wilkerson (31 January 1989), “‘African-American’ Favored By Many of America's Blacks”, in The New York Times, page A1: “A movement led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson to call blacks African-Americans has met with both rousing approval and deep-seated skepticism in a debate that is coming to symbolize the role and history of blacks in this country.”
- ^ “African-American”, in Google Books Ngram Viewer.
- ^ Cydney Adams (18 June 2020), “Not all black people are African American. Here's the difference.”, in CBS News, CBS News, retrieved 18 January 2024
Further reading
[edit]
African Americans on Wikipedia.Wikipedia - “African-American”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
- “African-American”, in Merriam-Webster.com Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.
- “African-American”, in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th edition, Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016, →ISBN.
Categories:
- English terms with IPA pronunciation
- English terms with audio pronunciation
- English lemmas
- English nouns
- English countable nouns
- English multiword terms
- American English
- English proscribed terms
- English offensive terms
- English adjectives
- English terms with quotations
- English terms with collocations
- English autohyponyms
- en:American demonyms